Joey Cooper writes: "Jimbo Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, announced today that he is pulling the plug on his much-hyped community-built search engine. Wikia Search's goal was to capture 5% of the search market, but it was widelypanned at its January 2008 launch and by August had only achieved 0.000079%. An overhaul last fall and switch to Yahoo!'s BOSS wasn't enough to save the ailing project. Wales said 'This one is too far away. It was going to take at least a another year to two before it's usable by the public, and we can't afford that right now.'"

ArrayIndexOutOfBound writes: "physorg.com has an article about Carolyn Doran, COO of Wikimedia.
"Before she left [Wikimedia] in July, Carolyn Bothwell Doran, 45, had moved up from a part-time bookkeeper for the Wikimedia Foundation and spent six months as chief operating officer, responsible for personnel and financial management.
At the time, she was on probation for a 2004 hit-and-run accident in Virginia that had landed her seven months in prison. Doran had multiple drunken-driving convictions, and records show earlier run-ins for theft, writing bad checks and wounding her boyfriend with a gunshot to the chest.""

"For more than six months, beginning in January of this year, Wikipedia's million-dollar check book was balanced by a convicted felon.
When Carolyn Bothwell Doran was hired as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation, she had a criminal record in three other states — Virginia, Maryland, and Texas — and she was still on parole for a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) hit and run that resulted in a fatality.
Her record also included convictions for passing bad checks, theft, petty larceny, additional DUIs, and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gun shot to the chest."

Goobergunch writes: The Register is reporting that Carolyn Doran, Chief Operating Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation from January to July of this year, was a convicted felon, with a criminal record in four states. Wikipedia general counsel Mike Godwin said that he had "no direct knowledge" of her record. Responsibilities of the Chief Operating Officer included ensuring effective audit trails and approval of Foundation expenditures.

Reservoir Hill writes: "Many meteor showers tend to disappoint, but the annual Geminid shower which peaks tonight, is expected to be a great one with forecasters predicting one or two shooting stars per minute during the peak hours. The moon is near its new phase, so skies will be dark. Meteors could start showing up anytime after dark this evening, low on the eastern horizon but a better display should begin after 10 pm local time, when the constellation Gemini, from which the meteors emanate, rises higher into the Eastern sky. By 2 am local time Gemini is directly overhead, and meteors will streak outward in all directions like spokes on a wheel. Here's some tips: Turn off all lights, indoors and out, dress warmer than you think necessary, give your eyes 15 minutes to adjust to the darkness, lie back on a lounge chair or blanket and scan as much of the sky as possible, and don't use binoculars or telescopes — meteors move too fast. If you live in the city, get out of town — city lights will overpower most of the meteors. "At first you might not see very many meteors — but be patient," said NASA astronomer Bill Cooke. "The show really heats up after midnight and by dawn on Friday.""

An anonymous reader writes: International Humanitarian Law professor Ludwig Braeckeleer thinks so. In an article published yesterday in the Korean newspaper OhMyNews, he reveals a discovery he made while researching a story on the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland. It turns out that a Wikipedia administrator named "SlimVirgin" is actually Linda Mack, a woman who as a young graduate in the 1980s was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger of ABC News to help with the investigation. Salinger later came to believe that Mack was actually working for Britain's MI5 on a mission to investigate the bombing and to infiltrate and monitor the news agency. Shortly after her Wikipedia identity was uncovered, many of her edits to articles related to the bombing were permanently removed from the database in an attempt to conceal her identity. This discovery comes only months after another Wikipedia admin was caught lying about his credentials to the press. What can Wikipedia do about those who would use it for their own purposes?

Posted
by
Zonk
on Saturday March 03, 2007 @06:40PM
from the who-can-you-trust dept.

ToiletDuck writes "Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales appears to have changed his mind concerning Essjay, the administrator who was caught lying about his academic credentials. Wales issued a statement today on his User Talk page requesting that EssJay voluntarily step down. Wales defended his earlier comment about EssJay, claiming 'I only learned this morning that EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes ... I want to make it perfectly clear that my past support of EssJay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on.' Wales did not comment on whether EssJay would continue to serve in his paid position at Wikia, the for-profit cousin of Wikipedia."